To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph
by Anne Sexton
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing this strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.
Conventional wisdom says that Icarus should have flown the middle way, like his father. However, Sexton seems to suggest there was something important about the trying and the failing, something more glorious than the sensible way of the father. When we think about the myths and what they say to our own lives, we need to look at them with fresh eyes; forget the conventional wisdom.
Quote by Anne Sexton, sent to me in a recent e-mail by my friend Beth:
"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
6 comments:
Yes yes yes - what an example! Now to follow it...
P.S. As a teenager, I loved Anne Sexton's poetry - thank you for re-introducing me to her. She is so clear and thoughtful
In most things I like the middle road. I have seen far to many Icaruses fly into the sun and be destroyed.
Celeste,
Yes, I know, I agree, and I have seen this too. Yet I can't help but think about it this way, too--if I had taken what I perceived as the middle road, I would have been a secretary at a gas company, still living in a suffocating home town instead of devoting myself to the art that I love. Do you see what I mean--the middle road, it's all relative. Sometimes its better to try and fail, rather than not to try at all. That's what I was trying to say. Do you see? --Theresa
One more thing about trying (and maybe failing) - I think we are so consumed as a society by the desire for "success" that we dare not risk failure, and we lose much by that. Elementary schoolchildren have their parents do their science projects for them so they won't fail - what a loss of a valuable lesson. If you can't learn to fail and get back up again in elementary school, where can you? It's OK to try and fail, isn't it, surely? As in, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
Vicky, how true! Yes, failing is important. Something in us dies when we fail, at least some part of the Icarus-self. But I can't find it in me to confine the Icarus-self, that self that goes boldly, to mere hubris. I see too many people like the speaker in Rukeyser's poem, who don't go boldly forth, but live a life of regret, having taken the middle way too often. You can't grow without experiencing a psychological death, as painful as that feels. And moreover, Celeste is quite right that there are examples of people crashing and burning out of ignorance, arrogance, and so forth. We have to learn to figure out the difference.
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